My Bipolar Disorder, Not YOURS

You’ve probably heard the phrase “You won’t really know what it feels like until you experience it” and, oddly, it usually comes about to a person who obviously hasn’t experienced it and has absolutely no understanding of it.

Like when a person of favorable size says around of person of generally unfavorable size, “Sometimes I feel so big. You shouldn’t worry about what other people say about you. You look great how you are.” As you may be aware, favorably sized person has pretty much used bigness as a benchmark of ‘lowness’ in her life. And even if one doesn’t know it consciously, just like this person doesn’t really know what it feels like to be big, a person of generally unfavorable size (or some other unfavorable attribute) can definitely feel the somewhat insulting feeling towards people of their size.

Or someone with Crohn’s reveals that fact- and some person says, “Oh, one time I had food poisoning- and it was the worst thing ever!” I’ve actually… *ahem* roomed with someone with the disease and three people- no joke, my friends- went on about some stomach bug or another. Sure food poisoning and sickness is horrible, but trying to relate to a person’s lifelong disease by referencing a nigh incomparable illness just shows how ignorant you really are.

Of course, I’m not immune to such antics either, though when I recall such instances I don’t think myself cute at all. I do, however, find it cute when I’m the object of  said antics.

So, I have bipolar disorder. When I first realized it fully, I began to notice that it’s not just me being calm and sweet to being depressed- because I knew for certain what that shit felt like, and was quite aware when I was dragging myself through it. No, it wasn’t normal wavelength to flatlining through sludge.

There’s something else. It’s not  ‘angry mode’. I’ve found the most common dichotomy of bipolarity in popular media (including cartoons, especially anime) is Calm/Happy and Psychotic/Angry.

No, my coin has FUCKING ECSTATIC on one side and DEATHLY DEPRESSION on the other. Often, I’m running along the narrow rim of normality, bumping over annoying people and small disappoints and the like before teetering on one side, losing balance, rolling down the wide diameter of one side then a slight rim job and then to the other side until something makes it all stop- a bottle of pills or a really good book or a long walk at 3AM.

What I’ve come up against the most is “Well, everyone has their off days.”

Now, that’s a completely true statement, but how can anyone tell me that after years of trying to stay on the rim, how can anyone even imply that I don’t know the difference between how I feel when I’m having an ‘off day’ or a ‘good day’ or depression and mania?

What bugs me the frickin’ most is that I begin to second-guess myself. My biggest clue that a majorly devastating depression is about to hit is when I begin to roll around in the euphoria-filled wonderland of mania. Mania now feels as recognizable to me as depression, but if I’ve heard that phrase recently I began to count off the good things that have happened to make me have a ‘happy day’.

And that’s how I felt today. I don’t remember who said something ignorant about bipolar disorder- it might have been someone’s post on Facebook or some shit- but I remembered the baseless sentiment and it stuck to me.

When I’m manic, I get the munchies, no weed needed. I’ve been eating constantly, but telling myself that I’ve just gotten off my period (even though I mostly get cravings before my period, and never after), and that I haven’t been eating as well as I should (which has also been true- but I’ve been eating better overall. Nothing as good as when I was eating nearly vegetarian at school, though),

When I’m manic I can’t concentrate. I’ve been multitasking in my free time for almost five days now, unable to spend good time with my sister (on anime or 642 and various other things) or anyone. Even on my computer, I check this, then this, then this, then this. And I’ve been telling myself that all of it is so very fun and no one would be able to stay on task, right?

When I’m manic, I get aroused easily. Now, I’m usually that way… But now I know it’s different, because I wake from sleep too aroused to lie down. I sit at the computer watching a youtube video or reading a comic, planning on going to bed in about half an hour and then BAM, I know I won’t be able to read or hear another word without relief.

When I’m manic, I go into panics over the stupidest things, and one not so stupid thing: I fully understand I’m manic now, and have been for nearly a week and this depression is going to be killer, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. That’s the not-so-stupid thing. Stupid things? Working at Denny’s yesterday, cutting tomatoes, and the way the tomato slices look- the shapes appear within:

Terrifying- But I realized that if the core is thick in the middle, I don’t panic

They got to be so scary that I stopped slicing tomatoes, diced them, and didn’t look back. The dark is too dark, and I can’t look anyone in the eye, it’s just too much!

I had to stop myself from screaming with delirious joy because we had Taco Bell downstairs, but I couldn’t keep the squeal away when my sister gave me her churro. I laugh out loud because the feeling in my chest is too much to contain, and I bite my arms to stifle the ants beneath my skin. And, hell, I’m too damn sore to do that again, though I can feel my body reeling with that energy.

I just hope I hit bottom within the next three days. I’m off from work. I haven’t been depressed for an extended period since January, and had mild manic attacks since then. But this… This is no ‘happy day’. I’ve been the same thing for fucking months. I’m doubting myself on going to a new school, on ever finding any lovers, of seeing my brother or any type of friend anytime soon, of ever truly liking my sister again or not thinking my dad is not worth talking to- but none of that bothers me at the moment.

But it will when I roll over to the other side, where I go so much more slowly…They won’t be simply ‘bad days’, they will all be the culmination of a goddamned depression  that I simply don’t want to deal with, especially when I’m so alone in it.

Is this Jealousy…

My sister has come back after nearly two months, having visited perhaps four times. My niece went went to her and hasn’t really been with me since and now she doesn’t want to sleep with me.

There’s weed and alcohol in my sister’s backpack. She’s taken over my other sister’s room and taken the blanket I’ve been using because it’s hers; she wants me to stop wearing her pants that I’ve been wearing to go to work.

No apologies or anything, not a lecture or anything from my parents.

And my niece loves her more than me. It hurts… It hurts so much I can’t stop crying. I can’t, I can’t…

It’s just so painful.

On my brother’s bed with my latest story

I like to write stories (well, I like to do a hell of a lot of things). Um, control + f Writing Block if you want to read about me and writing.. This turned out a lot longer than I intended. 

I also have bipolar disorder (and allergies and asthma and a high risk of stroke without ever smoking cigarettes). 

I went home from school in November. I think I wrote about that, and, if I didn’t, that’s not what I want to write about. I know I wrote about the comics I am reading. I’ve started rereading Tj and Amal after a marathon of recently discovered by moi Manly Men doing Manly Things (It’s absolutely hilarious). For some reason, I got really motivated to write. 

But I’ve been outta school going on three months, and because of constant procrastination and hopelessness and pride and lack of motivation- it doesn’t seem like I’ll be able to go back to school at the end of January, which busted whatever healthy mentality I had left. Over these past weeks, I beat four games (Resident Evil Mercenaries, Resident Evil 6, The Walking Dead, and Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance…Hm, pick the one that doesn’t belong!) I was really motivated to beat the last two within the last two weeks because I’ve been sleeping 13 hour days and going into my “catatonic skipping” for most of the other 11. I’m a fucking mess.

Unfortunately, I can’t bring myself to care in the least. No one else really does. Well, they’ll care if things become bad (like people do about gun control and rape culture), but most of the time it’s ignored. Not like I’m complaining- if I don’t care, why should anyone else? But it has gotten to a point where I start dwelling on that emo shit that nothing matters in the end and I’m all alone and fuck all what else. 

It’s not helping that my favorite person in the whole world (my brother) seems to have… We’ve kind of distance ourselves from each other. I’ve tried keeping up conversations with him- calling, texting, messaging on Facebook… But we’ve regressed to funny gifs passed between each other and lols. I have my pride, as I’ve said, and I don’t want to come across needy and desperate. My brother has my (what the hell- I meant his. Why did I put ‘my’?) own life to live. But to know that a relationship more precious than air can be rendered so makes me horribly bleak about the future. 

It doesn’t help that my other brother is on some fucking shtick. When I was at school, he and my father got in a fight. My brother was talking about killing himself at his school, and he was sent to a mental hospital and my dad was sent to jail for a week. That was in October. At first, I was all on my bro’s side because I was like- I understand some of your pain. I forgot how much of a little shit he is. He’s milking his situation for all it’s worth: threatening to call the police whenever Pops says boo shit to him, claiming to want to kill himself whenever he is forced to do homework or go to school or fucking apologize for some awful crap he says, and posting Facebook statuses threatening any and all who disagree with him. It’s gotten to a point where I honestly don’t even fucking like him anymore. And he’s such a shallow idiot, if he ever came across this and realized this was his sister, he’ll just be all tl;dr.

It doesn’t help that though my dad is getting the short end of the stick in the above situation, the man is still a gigantic asshole, and my bro’s behavior is his and Mama’s fault. All six of us kids have been telling our parents (since we eldest were in freakin’ elementary school) that they were spoiling him. When my dear brother and I were in high school, and my sister Statistic became such, we were afraid our youngest brother was going to turn out the same way, and we warned our parents. Dad continued to ignore us and Mama was forever like, “You were the same way when you were his age.” Now, it’s come to bite them in the ass. First of all, Mom can never say that shit to me again. When I was younger, and youngest idiot was in elementary school, I still was offended that my mother dare compare me to the likes of my younger brother- because he was a brat compared to me (I used to say that too, and she would say, “You’re a brat, too”). Those middle school years, I would remember when my dad would punch me or slap me or scream at me or call me “fucking stupid” or call me my brother’s slave or a little bitch or fight my brother. I remember in Kindergarten when I put on my favorite shirt and my dad hit me with the metal side of the belt because he was tired of it. I remember being smacked in the eye for choking on a piece of ice. I remember being hit in the stomach because I couldn’t hold my vomit when I got carsick. Yet, when I had told my parents that little bro yet again didn’t do his chores, and I did them for him so that everyone could be fine, I was the rebellious brat. 

Now that my bro is sixteen, I don’t really have to go back to that crap. When I was sixteen, I first chair in band, the only girl on the wrestling team, one of seven members of a high school chapter of a local sorority, making straight A’s, doing all the chores myself to keep a bunch of assholes happy. My bro is practically failing and hasn’t bathed in four days. 

To make me an even more terrible person (this is not sarcasm), I’m kind of glad this all happened. The assholes deserve each other. 

This whole experience hasn’t humbled my father in the least. We were playing Say Anything  (a tiny bit like Apples to Apples) and he was angry that the questions were unfair to people who didn’t know the ‘picker’ well. I.E. his wife and children. I argued that’s part of the game, and he came across so condescending and insulting, I made no efforts to make peace with him. Last night, my sister was finishing up The Walking Dead. She took a break and my dad came down from his room, thinking we were going to play something  more violent (we do play a lot of violent games. I convinced him to look at something so wonderful because The Walking Dead has a titillating amount of substance. Should have known he would ruin it… When the break was longer than he wanted- about seven minutes- he told me to play. I told him that she would miss the game. It was only after a bit of back and forth that I realized that my father hasn’t realized that the game industry has progressed beyond rather pointless coin-grabbing and dot-collecting. When I was trying to explain he suddenly got up and yelled, “Whatever, ya’ll are freakin’ pathetic” and left back to his room.

I told my mom to tell him not to call me pathetic anymore. She pats me on the goddamn arm and says something along the lines of “You know how he acts sometimes” and I told her to just make sure he doesn’t call me that anymore. Especially over something so stupid. Especially because he didn’t understand, and lashed out at me. 

Gee, I wonder why youngest bro has no sense of responsibility and ownership over the consequences of his actions. 

It doesn’t help (along those same lines) that my sister Statistic (the one with the new love of my life- my dear niece) gets drunk and/or high nearly every night, sexes up some guy on the internet nearly every night, complains about her ‘haters’ nearly every hour, and entertains/fantasizes about the thought of sending my niece to her father in New York for about a year. The guy who she couldn’t get to pay child support and so she has reaction formation about it- she made a Facebook video today to all the ‘bitches’ who try to make their ‘baby daddies’ pay child support. The guy who grabbed his daughter by the leg and shook her to make her stop crying. The guy who is a thousand of dollars in debt because he spent more on material to make Spice even as his child went hungry. The guy who made his daughter TERRIFIED of black men unless they grovel FOR WEEKS (or they always come by with candies and technology- i.e. my brother). 

Why does she entertain this idea, you may ask? She’s tired of ‘never doing anything she wants to do’ and ‘taking care of [niece]’. Mind you all her recreational activities. And let’s add her club-going and sneaking out the house- twenty fucking years old. Let’s add the fights she get into with her ‘haters’. The fights she talks about over and over and over and over to all her boy-friends. 

And whenever she gets a job- SHE’S HAD SO FREAKIN’ MANY- LIKE SEVEN OR EIGHT SINCE BEING OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL. Sorry for the caps… Not like anyone is still reading…. Well, she gets high or drunk or pissed and ends up getting fired. She always talks about joining the military. Gets a go about it for a week, two at most, and goes back to the usual stuff. It’s gotten to the point where no one thinks she’ll stick with anything… Kind of like when she started what my parents thought would be her rebellious phase, and was lying constantly so no one believed anything she says (still don’t). 

I’m not upset with her doing stupid shit. I do it enough as well. What I can’t stand is how she can’t own up to it- just like Pops and lil bro.Nothing is ever their fault and even when it obviously is, there’s something indefatigably stupid about you for pointing it out. 

It doesn’t help that my niece is her daughter. 

It doesn’t help that the other sister is on her way to becoming like me, socially wise. Things are probably going to be better for her though. She’s Christian, straight, pretty ‘girly’ in all its stereotypical connotations and concerned with things like popularity and such like that. When I asked her to help me write a Christmas card to a dying kid, she told me such kind of things make her jealous. “Over the cancer kid?” I had asked. She replied that was so. I told her that was bad. She simply shrugged and continued watching Netflix. She is the sibling I most connect to (because of anime, lack of self-esteem and certain books) but something changed then that made me lose all hope for a few days, and now makes my heart heavy. She’s overweight and has extremely high blood pressure, so that hurts her esteem. But she’s cute and funny, while I’m a hairy, bipolar, ugly bitch. 

Ewzers. 

It doesn’t help that my last brother is amazing, but because of age difference and personality differences we never really bonded as I did with my older brother, and now so far in our lives (like it’s sooooo far, haha) I don’t want to get close to him because I don’t want to be separated. 

But from my Writing Block, of which I intended to write and got way sidetracked, and making myself happier with comics, I opened up a story that I hadn’t updated, though I was so excited to share… I opened it up and anxiety welled up inside me. 

YOU CAN’T EVEN STAY IN SCHOOL! YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING TO FINISH THIS?

YOU’VE NEVER HAD A LOVER!

YOUR BROTHER DOESN’T CARE FOR YOU ANYMORE- HE HAS [HIM].

ISN’T THAT YOUR FIFTH DR. PEPPER?

YOUR FEET ARE CRACKED AND BLEEDING FROM SKIPPING- YOU’RE A LUNATIC.

YOU’RE STILL FANTASIZING ABOUT SOME DEUS EX MACHINA TO SAVE YOUR LIFE- HOW PATHETIC!

YOUR MONEY IS ALL GONE BECAUSE YOU SPEND IT TO FILL THAT VOID IN YOUR LIFE- THAT VOID THAT IS GOING TO GET BIGGER AND BIGGER AND BIGGER!

LOOK AT YOU, CRYING OUT FOR HELP- BUT NO ONE IS GOING TO HELP YOU. YOU’RE GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE. EVERYONE KNOWS IT. 

YOUR FAMILY IS GOING TO GET WORSE AND WORSE AND WORSE- YOUR MOM IS GOING TO HAVE ANOTHER ANEURYSM. POPS IS GOING TO DIE OF CANCER AND YOU’RE GOING TO FEEL AWFUL. 

CHARLIE’S GOING TO BE LIKE [STATISTIC] OR END UP DEAD FROM NEGLECT. 

YOU’LL NEVER BE HAPPY. YOU’LL NEVER BE HAPPY. YOU’LL NEVER BE HAPPY. 

YOU’RE BIPOLAR AND YOU’LL NEVER BE HAPPY. 

*cue shutting down computer music*

At Home

After quite a battle back and forth between depression and mania, I find myself having withdrawn from all my classes and at home, having just put the baby to sleep. I have not an ounce of work to worry about, but the bed bugs and lack of food has me worried. I have my games, and writing, and books- but a piece of me dies, or at least hibernates, whenever I’m not at school.

I feel like a failure. A complete and utter failure of all things. I’ve been playing a lot of games and reading, but what I really want is recognition on my writing. Well, not recognition per se, more like constructive criticism. I wonder if I wrote in detail just how much I really think about all my stories, would people be more interested, or will someone suggest I go back to the psyche ward?

Anyway, I’m rewriting a Maléan Demon and have added a new chapter to Maléan Cages. I have urges to complete a couple of short stories in the work, but I am feeling more along the lines that everything is for naught, i.e. depressed. I hate feeling this way, but what else am I to do? There’s few out that have the time or patience or interest… and if they did, they wouldn’t spend such precious materials on me

http://original.adultfanfiction.net/story.php?no=600105706&chapter=6

http://aarinfantasy.com/forum/fiction/showentry.php?e=109123&catid=10

Yea… Yea, that’s still fun.

Working

So, I really, really, really, really want to work and go to school. Other than my brother getting this new job that’s right in his face, it’s what I want most right now. But many people are saying it’s nothing to worry about and everything happens for a reason. It’s just really hard, ya’ know? I feel so useless and unproductive because I am. There’s no question about it; I”m not doing anything except trying and trying is just not good enough! But…

I just want to go back!!!

To school! Yes, school! I am currently enrolled at Johns Hopkins University but now I am temporarily dismissed. I didn’t want to be but I am and in the a.m. of this warm morning I believe that these five months of doing absolutely, or at least mostly, nothing but babysit and play games and ride the bus (yes, I’ve ridden enough times to list the damn motherf——) I feel like I could very well bash my own head in!

Get me the hell out of here, I want to scream constantly. I want to cry. But I drown out that horrible voice with sodas and smother it with food and I blast it away with music. Thank goodness I have a high metabolism or else I would be one big mofo.